The Medusa Amulet

by Robert Masello

  When the piece was finished, Marie Antoinette looked up at the round of applause, and upon seeing the marquis, glided across the floor toward him. At Versailles, even the way women walked, their feet swishing across the floor as if barely in contact with it, was prescribed and artificial.

  But there was nothing false about the warmth of her smile.

  “It was such a wonderful surprise to see you tonight!” she declared. “I hope you will be spending many days with us!”

  “I haven’t made my plans as yet,” he replied.

  “Good! Then I’ll make them for you,” she said, taking his arm and introducing him to several of the guests he did not know. It was only here, at the Petit Trianon, that she could be so free-spirited and informal. She had made the place her private retreat, a refuge from all the stifling protocol and public display of the main palace; here, she had even arranged for the servants to be kept out of sight, and in her boudoir she had installed panels that could shutter the windows entirely with just the turn of a handle.

  “Tomorrow,” she said to the marquis, “we’ll have a sleigh ride on the Grand Canal, then a performance at the theater. I’ll arrange it all! And tonight, of course, Count Cagliostro will be demonstrating his powers of mesmerism and mind reading.”

  “I was hoping to find him here already.”

  “Oh, he is always very mysterious,” Antoinette said. “He likes to make a grand entrance. But this gives us time to play something together!” she said, drawing him toward the harpsichord. “We keep your flute here always.”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t played much lately,” the marquis demurred, but Antoinette, pouting, said, “Not even for me?”

  When the Queen of France made such a remark, it was never clear, even given their friendship, whether it was a request or an order. And when she suggested that they play “ C’est Mon Ami,” he knew she would brook no denial. The lyrics of the song had been written by the poet Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian, but the music was the queen’s own composition, and she was quite proud of it.

  The flute was presented to him, with an exaggerated bow and a sly smile, by the Princesse de Lamballe; he knew she sensed his reluctance. The flute itself had been a gift from Antoinette, a way to encourage him to come to the Trianon and accompany her, and now, as she launched into the tune, singing the words in a bright contralto, he had little choice but to bend his head and play the tune from memory.

  “ C’est mon ami, Rendez-moi,” she sang, her head erect, “ J’ai son amour, Il a ma foi,” repeating the refrain. She was dressed in a gossamer peach chemise over a silk gown, with no hoops or stays, and in her hair she wore a simple aigrette of white heron feathers with a sapphire clasp. Her figure had filled out, and her Habsburg lip, with its unfortunate droop, had become more pronounced, but her grace and carriage were unchanged. Fersen, the Swedish count, watched her with a rapt gaze, and the marquis was glad that she had found someone to provide her with the passion that the king, a cold and ungainly man, with an equally dismal reputation in the bedroom, could not. (It was common knowledge that he had a physical deformity that made intercourse painful for him.)

  They had no sooner finished the tune than the applause was abetted by the sound of clapping from the entryway, where a stout, swarthy man with smoldering eyes, rimmed with kohl, stood. His dark hair was swept back with pomade but no powder, and he was dressed all in black, his silk tailcoat adorned with white ivory scarabs and amber pins shaped like gargoyles.

  La Medusa, on a silver chain, hung around his neck.

  Even as Sant’Angelo’s eyes were riveted on the glass, Count Cagliostro’s were drawn to him. It was as if two predators had crossed paths while hunting and did not know whether to go their own way or lock themselves in combat.

  The court jewelers, however, had been right-this Medusa was the same as the one on the marquis’s ring.

  And it did not bear the ruby eyes of the version he had made for Eleonora de Toledo.

  This, then, was the glass that possessed the power, the one that the Pope had stolen centuries before. Sant’Angelo could not imagine by what circuitous pathway it had come down to Cagliostro… but he did know that he would reclaim it before the night was through.

  “I am honored,” Cagliostro said, approaching and bowing his head, “to make your acquaintance at last.”

  When he looked up again, it was with a soulful but piercing gaze, and Sant’Angelo recognized that the man was taking his measure.

  Just as he was doing in return.

  “I have heard so much about you, in so many quarters, for so long,” the count went on, in a voice that seemed purposefully mellifluous… and difficult to trace. There was the hint of Italian in it, but also an intonation that seemed deliberately Eastern. “Your eye for things of beauty is celebrated everywhere.”

  The marquis did not know if the count referred, obliquely, to the queen, or the famously orphaned diamond necklace. He suspected the confusion was intended.

  “As are your powers in other spheres,” he added.

  Sant’Angelo had no doubt, however, what this last sally referred to. He had acquired a reputation, wherever he went over the years, as a master of the dark arts. No one else, it was said, could have had the courage to inhabit the notorious Chateau Perdu, or have acquired such wealth and position with no known forebears. It was rumored that the marquis could read minds and foretell the future. It was a reputation that he neither encouraged nor dispelled.

  “And your reputation, Count, certainly precedes you everywhere,” the marquis replied. “The queen tells me you’ll be doing some of your tricks tonight.”

  A flash of anger crossed Cagliostro’s face, which he quickly disguised. “I will, of course, do the queen’s bidding, but tricks are the province of magicians.”

  “Oh,” Sant’Angelo said, “I was under the wrong impression. I am so sorry if I have given offense.”

  “Not at all.” His thick fingers touched La Medusa on its chain. “I can’t help but notice that you seem intrigued by my medallion.”

  “I am,” the marquis replied. “Where did you get it?”

  He could see a quick calculation going on in Cagliostro’s mind. “It was a gift,” he then said, “from Her Majesty.”

  This news astonished the marquis. How had he known nothing of this?

  “It was sent to her by His Holiness, Pope Pius VI,” the count continued, plainly having decided that the truth in this instance did more for his status than any lie might have done, “on the birth of her son, Louis-Charles. To protect the mother and child from the evil eye.”

  “ Il malocchio,” Sant’Angelo said.

  “You know our countrymen,” Cagliostro replied. “The queen wore it to a reception for the Pope one night, purely as a courtesy, but had very unpleasant dreams and asked me to dispose of it the next day. But it was so beautifully wrought, I could not bear to do it.”

  “How fortunate,” the marquis replied.

  “Besides, the queen has no use for such superstitious baubles. She had already found a nearly identical trinket in the royal coffers, but this one had ruby eyes, and she had melted it down to make a silver buckle for her shoe. The rubies became a pair of earrings for a friend.”

  That anyone, even a queen of France, would make such use of his handiwork made Sant’Angelo’s blood boil.

  And as if Cagliostro knew that he was pricking the count, he languidly raised one hand toward the Princesse de Lamballe and said, “You see? She’s wearing the earrings now.”

  Sant’Angelo struggled to betray no emotion. This was the fate, he knew, of so much of his work-to be unwittingly disassembled or pillaged for its precious elements. But to discover that not one, but both, of his amulets should have found their way to the same place-one by way of the Medici, one from the hand of a pope-was astonishing beyond measure. It was as if the two Medusa s had been drawn to each other, across space and time, by a force as mysterious as magnetism and unstoppable as the tides. Magic, beyond mag
ic.

  He simply thanked God that this one piece had survived.

  Raising it on its chain appraisingly, Cagliostro said, “Rumor has it that it’s over two hundred years old-the work of Benvenuto Cellini, in fact.”

  “Really?” the marquis replied. He had quite purposefully taken off his identical ring and left it at the Chateau Perdu. He pretended to examine the piece more closely. “I wasn’t aware that he worked in niello.”

  “Cellini worked in every form and finish.”

  He was right about that, Sant’Angelo thought; he had tried his skills at everything. But had the count unlocked La Medusa ’s secret, he wondered? Of course he would have uncovered its mirror… but had he put it to its proper use? Sant’Angelo’s hand itched with the urge simply to snatch the piece free, but he could hardly start a brawl in the queen’s own palace.

  “I’m so glad that you two have met,” the queen said, approaching with her Swedish lover Fersen standing close at her side. “I can’t think of two more accomplished men to add to our company tonight.”

  “Not three?” Fersen said, leaning in to her, and she laughed, batting at him with her fan.

  “Remember,” she confided to the marquis, “how you taught me to properly wield this weapon?”

  After some cajoling from de Lamballe and Polignac, Count Cagliostro consented to display some of his powers-acquired, or so he declared, from the ancient adepts in Egypt and Malta, hundreds of years ago. But then he was full of such boasts. Reputedly, he claimed to have restored the library at Alexandria at the behest of his personal friend, Cleopatra, and to have wielded the dagger that killed her consort, Ptolemy. He had been traveling all over Europe for years, raising money and founding lodges to promulgate the lost wisdom of Egyptian Masonry. As far as the marquis could tell, however, the lodges were empty, while the count’s pockets were full.

  He obliged the company now with some of the standard conjurations, making images appear in a vase of water (done, the marquis knew, with chemical reactions familiar to any alchemist worth his salt) and silverware move (with lodestones concealed in his cuff links). But the piece de resistance, for which the count was famous from Warsaw to London, was one of his mesmerism performances. In preparation, he asked that the lamps be dimmed and that everyone arrange their chairs or cushions to face in his direction. Fersen sat at the queen’s feet, along with her other lapdogs.

  Once everyone had done so, and a fair amount of nervous giggling had subsided, he asked for volunteers for the first experiment-and Mme. Polignac’s hand went up in an instant. She came forward, grinning, and took a chair he set out. Cagliostro drew himself up to his full height (augmented, the marquis was convinced, by platforms in his boots) and carefully removed La Medusa from around his neck. Holding it up, he let it dangle in the air.

  As the others watched silently, he instructed the young princess to attend only to the sound of his voice, and gaze only at the medallion, which he swung slowly back and forth, back and forth. Sant’Angelo had seen similar displays at the salons of Franz Mesmer in Vienna, and within minutes the suggestible young woman was under his sway.

  “You are in a deep sleep,” he intoned, “a deep and comforting sleep… but when I tell you to awake, you will awake, and you will rush to kiss the oldest man you see in the room.”

  For a split second, the marquis wondered if he would be unmasked.

  But when the duchess came out of her trance, she glanced about, as if unaware that anything at all had happened, then scurried to a dignified old burgher, distantly related to the Habsburgs, and throwing her arms around his neck, kissed him.

  The room erupted into laughter, and the duchess, blushing fiercely, stepped back, her hand to her mouth. The burgher reached out playfully, as if to claim another kiss, but Cagliostro called him forward instead. The man took the chair the princess had vacated, and once again the count placed him under his spell.

  “And when you awake,” he suggested this time, “you will stand on one leg and crow like a rooster anytime Her Majesty plays the refrain of ‘ C’est Mon Ami.’”

  A ripple of subdued mirth went through the room, and Cagliostro raised a finger to hush them. Bringing the burgher back to his wits, he said, mournfully, “Alas, your will was too strong for me.”

  “I could have told you that before you went to so much trouble,” the old man huffed, proudly.

  “I could do nothing to overcome it,” Cagliostro said, as the queen crept to the harpsichord and began to play the refrain of “ C’est Mon Ami.”

  Not even back in his own seat yet, the burgher suddenly lifted one leg and let out a trilling cock-a-doodle-do. Then, so surprised was he at his own action-and in front of the queen yet!-he tumbled, beet red, onto a velvet settee.

  The marquis knew where this was going-the count was going to mesmerize everyone at once, then do something to leave the proof that he’d done it-removing and hiding all their shoes, for instance. Mesmer had once switched everyone’s jewelry around. It was all just a parlor game, and Sant’Angelo knew that it depended upon the willing abdication of will on the part of everyone in the room… a phenomenon he knew could sweep over an intimate group quite readily.

  So, when the count did indeed ask for everyone’s attention, and insist that they all follow his instructions and his voice to the letter, he played along, lowering his own eyelids, then his head on cue. But his hands were folded in his lap, like an arrow, and his thoughts were directed, straight as a rapier, at the count.

  Already, he could sense a hesitancy creeping into Cagliostro’s words.

  The marquis raised his eyes, and even in the gloom, he could see that the count was studying him.

  Yes, I know every trick in your bag, Sant’Angelo thought.

  And like a lightning bolt, a thought shot right back into his own head. Every trick?

  The marquis rocked back in his chair, in shock. This so-called count had greater powers than he had ever imagined, powers that Sant’Angelo assumed only he possessed. The marquis knew nothing of the Egyptian Masons, with whom Cagliostro claimed to have studied, but it was clear that he had learned great secrets, nonetheless. What Sant’Angelo had divined from the ancient stregheria of Sicilian witches, the count must have imbibed from his Coptic priests. While heads drooped and arms hung listlessly all around the room, Sant’Angelo and his adversary were wide awake, all their respective faculties focused on each other.

  But you challenge the power of the pharaohs, my friend.

  To Sant’Angelo’s astonishment, the shadows in the room began to move and take on the shape of birds-fat black ravens-that swirled across the walls and ceiling, before ominously massing. The marquis’s respect for Cagliostro’s powers grew even larger as he braced himself for an attack.

  Which came only seconds later.

  In a silent horde, their wings spread and beaks open, the ravens swooped down and Sant’Angelo instinctively started to raise his hands to protect himself against them. But then he caught himself-if you gave in to the illusion, you only gave strength to it-and deliberately let his arms drop to his sides.

  If you let your adversary alter your reality, you became his slave.

  And Sant’Angelo was not about to let that happen.

  The parrot on the mantelpiece squawked in alarm, and the white monkey screeched. The little dogs yapped and scuttled from the room, as the queen stirred in her chair, and Fersen muttered uneasily.

  I know what you’ve come for, the count continued.

  The marquis berated himself for allowing his desires to become evident.

  So it must be more valuable than I know.

  The candles in the chandelier sputtered, some blowing out, as a wind seemed to sweep through the garden and rustle the curtains.

  Oh, how he had underestimated his opponent, Sant’Angelo realized.

  But then, so had the count.

  The marquis took a steadying breath, and concentrated his mind. He could feel Cagliostro trying to batter his way in again
, but now that he was aware of the count’s abilities, Sant’Angelo was able to effectively shut him out. He imagined himself ensconced, surrounded, protected, behind the high walls of the Chateau Perdu.

  A draft blew through the room, sending the sheet music flying from the harpsichord.

  And then the marquis conjured an eagle, its broad wings and razor-sharp talons spread, flying into the flock of ravens, tearing their ranks into disarray. The ravens scattered, some plummeting from the sky with broken wings and loose feathers, others disappearing like smoke.

  If a battle of conjurations was what Cagliostro wanted, the marquis would give it to him, in spades.

  But even as his eagle wreaked havoc, another and more sinister figure arose on the wall to defy it-the size and shape of a man, it bore the long snout and high pointed ears of a jackal.

  Sant’Angelo recognized it instantly.

  It was Anubis, the ancient Egyptian god of death, rising up like an avenging angel.

  Before his eyes, the creature expanded, its muzzle extending out over the ceiling, its jaws open, its teeth like the jagged edge of a saw…

  And even Sant’Angelo felt a momentary shudder. Resist it, he told himself.

  The creature’s paws seemed to extend along the walls, long nails raking the mantelpiece and window frames.

  Terrifying as it is, it is just an illusion.

  But then, even to the marquis’s astonishment, the monster’s claws knocked a vase from the mantel. It shattered on the floor, and Antoinette herself let out a whimper of fear.

  My God, he thought-Cagliostro was the most formidable adversary he had ever crossed.

  The back of his neck tingled with what felt like the jackal’s hot breath, and even the drip of saliva from its slavering jaws.

  “ Do you surrender? ” He heard the count’s voice, echoing as if from the bottom of a well. “ Do you bend your will to mine? ”

  And in answer-what use were further words?-Sant’Angelo conjured a lion, massive and ferocious, roaring with rage. It sprang up from the floor, taking shape as it rose, its mane bristling, its ragged claws taking wild, deadly swipes at the head of the rearing jackal.